Age shall not wither them ... Composer Elliott Carter and pianist Charles Rosen at New York's Tribeca festival, 2004. Photograph: David Holloway/Getty
When New York's Guggenheim Museum opens its much-anticipated Louise Bourgeois exhibition later this month, the sculptor, honoured recently with a Tate Modern retrospective, will doubtless attend. She is only 96. In May, I attended a Carnegie Hall concert featuring the music of the centenarian Elliott Carter who himself was ebulliently present in the third row, leaping up to shake hands with well-wishers.
Owing in part to improved medical care, cultural stars are not just refusing to go gentle into that good night, they are refusing to go anywhere. Defying the cranky, humorous view of retirees as displayed in the Oldie magazine, many artists older than Bourgeois are continuing their aesthetic battles. Swiss tenor Hugues Cuénod made headlines last year when he married his longtime boyfriend at the age of 105. Cuénod also only recently retired from performing - he sang opera until his early 90s and narrated musical programs for several more years. The centenarian Dutch actor and singer Johannes Heesters is less modest than Cuénod and continues to perform; indeed in February he was booed off the stage at the age of 104 during a rare appearance in his native land (the catcalls were not due to the quality of his performance, but because of his second world war Nazi connections).
Similar acts of longevity can even be seen in the world of dance. A Japanese founder of the Butoh dance form, Kazuo Ohno, whom I saw perform at the Palais Royal in Paris a dozen years ago, is still active at 101 - although based on a recent short film co-starring the French dancer Virginie Marchand, it may well be time for Ohno to retire. Far more zesty is the Brazilian comedienne Dercy Gonçalves, born in 1907, some of whose remarks would shock Joan Rivers. Gonçalves's more dignified compatriot and contemporary Oscar Niemeyer, a mighty architect, intimated to the Guardian last year that he still enjoys conjugal life with his much younger spouse. In the intellectual sphere, the French anthropologist and author Claude Lévi-Strauss is braving a flood of interviews preceding his centenary this November.
What gives these people the rage to live? Anger at younger people's stupidity may be one goading force. When I interviewed Mr. Lévi-Strauss 20 years ago, I noted that in the elevator of his Paris building, someone had incised the words "Mort aux cons" (death to idiots). I asked Lévi-Strauss if he was the graffitist, and he smilingly denied it, but seemed to agree with the sentiment.
